


everything goes ( it passes )

by grenades



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Spider-Man: Far From Home, SPOILERS!!!!!, Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie), a balm for ur hurt heart, death ment and like... nightmares so.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 07:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19459600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grenades/pseuds/grenades
Summary: it's been weeks since everything unfolded, and peter's nightmares have only gotten worse- thankfully, EDITH is there to help ( and share a secret or two ).





	everything goes ( it passes )

**Author's Note:**

> title from [this song](www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iSZ7ff-i8) .

Lately, the dreams all start like this:

Peter is in the dark. It’s an empty kind of darkness, cold and bleak and lonely, and Peter finds himself shivering despite the insulated fibres of his suit. 

_It’s not real_ , he tells himself.

 _Is it?_ Another voice asks slyly. This voice has been louder lately, after everything that happened with Mysterio. _Can you trust your eyes? Your ears? Your sixth sense?_

Something looms out of the black fog, clumsy and slow. Peter fights the urge to cover his eyes and steels himself. He knows what he’ll see- the same thing he’s watched every night for the past two weeks.

It’s better to stay silent, but the words spill past his lips anyways. 

“Mr. Stark?”

The tombstone stares back at him, pale and hard and unforgiving. This time, there is only STARK engraved on the smooth marble. Peter reaches out to touch it, throat tight with grief and words he wishes he’d spoken earlier- and gasps when the marble ripples like jelly under his fingers, twists the word carved there into a smaller, deadlier sentence: 

YOU DID THIS. 

“No,” Peter says softly, the sound of his own heartbeat filling his ears. “I didn’t- there wasn’t anything I could _do_ -,” 

The earth rumbles under his feet; for a moment, Peter braces himself for an elemental to claw its way out of the frosted soil and rock. It’s a hand that shoots out of the earth to snag his ankle, however. Even crusted in dirt and chunks of vien, Peter knows that hand.

( He’s watched those hands build and create and plan, seen those hands strike down alien creatures and the vilest human beings earth has to offer.

Peter shook that hand, once. 

He was the last person to hold it when it was still warm. ) 

Panic surges through him, twists his brain up into knots and snatches away his logic. 

“Nononono _no_ ,” he stammers, kicking back ( away, even though some stupid, pathetic part of him wants to get _closer_ ) against that hand that reaches out for him. “Mr. Stark- _please_ , I didn’t-,”

The words tear themselves out of his throat, sharp enough for Peter to taste blood, thick and coppery. “I didn’t kill you!”

The suit rises silently from the ground, dirt cascading off of it in a steady stream. Peter recoils at the sight of greying, bare bones and loose teeth. 

It doesn’t look like Iron Man, shouldn’t be Tony Stark- but the voice that rattles out of the suit is undeniably his. 

“Ever heard of the butterfly effect, kid?”

Peter chokes back a sob and presses a shaking hand against his mouth. Tony moves forward, hollow eyes seeing everything and nothing.

“It’s a theory to do with choices. It hypothesizes that a butterfly flapping its wings in California could cause a colossal tsunami in Beijing.” He leans in close enough so that Peter can see the shiny black beetles scurrying out of his eyes. 

“Know what that means?”

Peter shakes his head back and forth vigorously. 

Tony reaches out with one finger bone and taps Peter over the chest. “It means that _you’re_ the butterfly, Parker.”

Peter watches his arms dissolve into a fine cloud of grey dust and screams and screams and-

“-ER?”

He’s awake, now- or is he? What’s real and what’s fake- there’s his bed, soft and scratchy under him, and the nightlight in the corner is on, and-

“PETER.”

There’s a faint blue glow coming from his desk drawer. Panting, he shoves his legs off of the bed and staggers over to it, shivering at the sensation of his sweat-slick skin chilling against the cool night air from the open window. 

( If you’d asked Peter a few years ago what his favourite colour was, he would have told you “ _orange_!” with no hesitation. 

Now, though, that question is a loaded gun. 

Maybe he’ll say “ _blue_ ,” and shut down. Maybe he’ll hesitate just a little too long before muttering “ _orange_ ”, fists clenched like he’s mad at himself for lying. 

He’s unpredictable, now.)

Peter pulls open the drawer. “Oh. Hey, EDITH.”

The glasses pulse blue at him. “PETER, I’M DETECTING A PATTERN OF DISTRESS AND AN ELEVATED HEART RATE WHILE YOU SLEEP.”

“Yeah, well. Bad dreams happen.” Peter swallows and picks the glasses up carefully. They’re heavier than they look, and are both a comforting and distressing weight in the palm of his hand. 

( EDITH is a reminder of the burden on Peter’s shoulder, and the remnant of somebody gone too soon. ) 

“MAY I SUGGEST TALKING TO A PROFESSIONAL, PETER? EVEN HEROES HAVE TROUBLE COPING WITH TRAUM-,”

“Shut up, EDITH!” Glasses still clenched tightly in his palm, Peter makes his way to the bathroom, one hand brushing against the hallway wall to reaffirm that it’s real. 

_I thought it would get better._ Peter knows that what he’s going through is considered normal in this line of work. He knows that Cap goes to therapy twice a week and that Agent Colson needs to take pills to help regulate his brain chemicals- he knows, he _knows_ , but it’s not the same for him. 

It feels like giving up, somehow. He feels like he owes it to Mr. Stark to not take the easy way out.

Peter flicks on the light and stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. There are dark smudges under his eyes, purple and red, and his face is pale and sweaty. 

The worst part is his _eyes_ , though. They’re wide and terrified- he looks hunted, looks like he’s one bad scare away from jumping out of his own skin. 

Frowning, he slides on the glasses. They’re a little too square for his face, a bit too bit: they slide down the bridge of his nose and shift over to one side of his face. 

_Like a child trying on a suit._

It’s not like he particularly wants to become the next Iron Man. He doesn’t want to be Mr. Stark. It’s just- Peter tilts his head to one side and then the other- it would be nice if he could just look a little bit like him, give off just a smidge of that easy-going charisma Mr. Stark had in spades. 

His mouth tastes like cotton and feels like sandpaper, so Peter picks up his toothbrush and toothpaste. 

_You’re not his son, you know._

“I wish I had been,” Peter confesses to his reflection. “Because he, uh, felt like my dad.” He pauses. “ _A_ dad. Like, a really cool dad that was super busy, but still made time for me.” 

“PLAY TAPES?” EDITH asks. 

Peter shrieks, jumps three feet in the air, and squeezes the tube of toothpaste so hard that it shoots out and hits the ceiling. “ _What_?”

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY ENCRYPTED TAPES TITLED “D1AD@@!?”

Peter’s heart leaps in his throat. He slides slowly to the ground, legs wobbly. “I- yeah. Please. You can do that?”

“YES, PETER.”

EDITH hums for a brief moment, and then Peter’s vision is filled with a very sunny view of Tony Stark’s lab. 

Mr. Stark sits at his desk in ratty sweatpants and a grey tank top that was, at some point, white. He looks- content. Happy, even. 

Peter blinks back the tears threatening to spill down his cheeks. 

Mr. Stark tinkers with a round ball of something spiky and neon pink for a while, humming a familiar melody under his breath. _Led Zeppelin?_ He looks up eventually, eyes widening briefly with surprise.

“Oh, yeah. This is recording. Shit.”

He sets the machine on the table and leans back, expression contemplative. “I’ve been thinking about a lot lately- mostly about finding a way to save the world, yada yada- but also about parenting, weirdly enough.”

A small giggle cuts in from somewhere offscreen, and Mr. Stark looks over, expression fond and a little sad. “Okay, maybe not so weird. Anyways, it made me think of dad. We were a lot alike, you know- both mega assholes who didn’t pay enough attention to the people that mattered the most.”

“That’s not true,” Peter says, voice thin. 

“We both thought that we had more time to make things right.” Mr. Stark stares out the window. “But- hey. If this all works out, I’ll still have one kid- two, if I’m lucky enough.”

“Daddy!” 

Peter’s heart drops, because there’s a _small girl_ crawling into Mr. Stark’s lap- a girl who will have to grow up without a father, now. 

Mr. Stark tweaks her nose affectionately. “Hey, kiddo. What’s going on?”

The girl- his _Morgan_ \- wrinkles her nose and proudly displays her chubby fingers, all of which are covered in various tints of paint. “‘M creating a masterease!”

“It’s master- _piece_ ,” Mr. Stark corrects, eyebrow quirked. “Wanna bring it over so I can see?” 

“Sure!” Smiling, she clambers out of his lap and toddles off, her little footsteps loud against the concrete floor. 

Mr. Stark watches her go, a sad smile on his face. 

Peter must be crying, now, because he can taste sea salt in his mouth all of a sudden. There’s not really any time to process this first video because all of a sudden its _switching_ , and it’s the lab and Mr. Stark again but everything is so much greyer this time. 

“Bonjour,” he says, accent awful, and Peter splutters out a laugh despite himself. “Welcome back to the circus.” 

He sighs, face weary and haggard. “I’m making this video for you, Happy. And you, Pep. If anything happens to me- should any scenario arise where I’m unable to do this myself- I want one of you to submit these for me.”

There’s a sleek, silver pen next to the stack of papers on his table, and he picks it up. “And Peter-,” 

Peter leans in, eyes wide. Mr. Stark taps the pen against the glass table. “20-8-18-5 20-8-15-21-19-1-14-4. Got that, kid?” 

“Uh-huh,” Peter manages, throat dry, even though he knows that Mr. Stark can’t hear him.

The feed cuts out after a few more moments, and by that time Peter has stubbed his toe twice on furniture, thwacked his head against the doorframe, and has his phone out and up against his ear. 

It’s three-twenty-two in the morning, but Pepper Potts picks up on the second ring, because she’s _Pepper_ and at this point she knows Peter’s number by heart.

Her voice is hoarse with sleep and tinged with alarm. “Peter? Are you okay?” 

Peter clears his throat. “Um. Sorry to bother you this late, ma’am? But I found a video file of Mr. Stark on EDITH and I just wanted to know if these numbers Mr. Stark gave out meant anything to you?”

There’s shuffling on the other end of the line. “I-yes, go ahead.”

Peter reads out the numbers slowly. There’s a long, heavy silence stretching over the phone, and then- “ _oh_.” 

He can’t tell if it’s a good or bad reaction. “Mrs. Potts?”

Her voice is wobbly and thick. “I think it's the password for a safe. I want you to send me those video files right now. Jesus. Did he say anything else, Peter?”

“He said something about you or, uh, Happy submitting them for him?” 

“Well, this will solve a lot of time,” Pepper manages. Peter is one-hundred percent convinced that she’s crying at this point, and it’s enough to set him off, too.

“Is something wrong?” Peter whispers, faint, half-remembered whispers of his nightmare floating to the front of his head. 

Pepper laughs wetly. His enhanced ears can hear Morgan crying faintly about 'ewephants!' in the background. “No- it’s fine. I really shouldn’t be so surprised.” 

“What is it?”

“Well- they’re adoption papers, Peter. All filled out and everything.”

Peter blinks. “Oh, wow. For who?”

He can hear Pepper’s smile through the phone. “You.”

( You see- Peter _is_ the butterfly. 

He never made the choices. Tony did. 

He knew what he was doing- he made sure that at the very least, both of his kids would be okay. )

**Author's Note:**

> i saw the movie like 2 hours ago and banged this out bc. my heart hurty bitch! 
> 
> bc how are u gonna give peter the billion dollar prize and legacy that is EDITH and NOT have planned to adopt him just so that he could legally co-obtain ur wealth with ur biological infant daughter amirite!!!!!
> 
> come say hi to me on [twt ](https://twitter.com/BADKUG0U) if ya want. love u!


End file.
